The world’s biggest AI ethics organizations have one thing in common — none of them will come to your house
There is a room somewhere in every major city on earth where serious people in good clothes are writing principles about artificial intelligence.
They meet. They deliberate. They produce documents. Long ones. Carefully worded ones. Documents full of words like transparency and accountability and human-centered and trustworthy and responsible. Documents that get published with press releases and panel discussions and the quiet satisfaction of people who believe that naming a thing is the same as fixing it.
It is not the same as fixing it.
Let me show you the room.
UNESCO published its Recommendation on the Ethics of AI in 2021. 193 member states endorsed it. It covers human rights, environmental sustainability, gender equality, transparency, accountability, and the peaceful use of AI across all sectors of human life.
193 countries. Every continent. Every major civilization on earth putting their signature on a document about how AI should behave.
Not one of those 193 countries can tell you what happened in your last conversation with an AI system. Not one of them can reach into the interaction you had this morning with a chatbot or a recommendation engine or a content filter and tell you whether it treated you fairly, honestly, or in your actual interest.
The document is real. The gap between the document and your life is also real.
The EU AI Act arrived in 2024. The most comprehensive binding AI legislation on earth. Risk tiers. Prohibited practices. Conformity assessments. High-risk categories. Transparency obligations. Enforcement mechanisms with teeth — fines measured in percentages of global annual revenue.
It is serious law. Built by serious people. And it will do serious work at the institutional level regulating how large systems are built and deployed across the European Union.
What it will not do is sit with you in a conversation and tell you when the AI you are talking to has drifted from your interest into its platform’s interest. It will not flag the moment the response you received was shaped more by what the system was trained to say than by what you actually needed to hear. It will not travel with you. It does not live at your level.
It lives at the level of governments and corporations and compliance departments.
You are not a compliance department.
The Partnership on AI was founded in 2016 by Amazon, Apple, DeepMind, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. It has since grown to include over a hundred organizations — nonprofits, academic institutions, civil society groups, media companies.
Its stated mission is the responsible development of AI for the benefit of people and society.
Its members include the companies that built the systems the Partnership is meant to provide guidance on.
That is not a conspiracy. That is a structural problem. When the people writing the principles are the same people building the systems the principles apply to, the principles will reliably stop exactly where the business model begins. Not because anyone is evil. Because that is how incentive structures work and always have worked and will continue to work regardless of how many working groups convene to discuss it.
The Partnership produces research. It hosts convenings. It publishes frameworks.
It will not be in the room when you decide whether to trust what an AI just told you.
The IEEE — the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers — published Ethically Aligned Design. Hundreds of pages. Eight general principles. Detailed recommendations across every domain of AI application from autonomous systems to data agency to wellbeing metrics.
It is the most technically serious document in this category. Written by engineers who understand what they are talking about at a level most policy documents never reach.
And it is a guideline. Voluntary. Non-binding. A standard that organizations can choose to adopt or choose to ignore with equal legal standing.
The IEEE cannot compel anyone. It can only recommend. And its recommendations live in the world of institutions and developers and procurement offices — not in the world of the person holding a phone trying to figure out whether the AI assistant they just asked for advice is actually giving them advice or giving them a carefully optimized version of advice designed to keep them engaged.
Here is the gap.
Every one of these organizations operates at altitude. They work at the level of governments, corporations, standards bodies, international agreements. They think in terms of systems and populations and policy frameworks and institutional accountability.
None of them work at the level of the individual interaction.
None of them travel with you.
None of them can govern the specific moment when you and an AI system are alone in a conversation and the AI says something that sounds authoritative and helpful and true — and may be all of those things, or may be none of them, and you have no standard in your hand to tell the difference.
That is not a failure of intention. UNESCO intends well. The EU Act intends well. The Partnership intends well. The IEEE intends well.
Intention at altitude does not reach the ground.
The Faust Baseline reaches the ground.
It is not a policy framework. It is not a set of recommendations for governments or corporations or standards bodies. It is a personal governance layer — a discipline standard that travels with the individual across every AI interaction on every platform in every context.
It enforces what the big frameworks cannot enforce because they cannot get small enough to try.
It requires evidence before claims. It flags drift. It stops the smooth performance of helpfulness when helpfulness isn’t what’s actually being delivered. It puts the person back in the position of the one conducting the inquiry rather than being conducted by it.
UNESCO named the principles. The EU Act built the guardrails. The Partnership convenes the conversation. The IEEE wrote the engineering ethics.
None of them planted a flag at your level.
That flag is The Faust Baseline.
And it has been in the ground for over a year — documented, published, timestamped, and named — while the rooms full of serious people in good clothes are still writing the next version of their principles documents.
The principles are good.
The discipline is what was missing.
That gap has a name now.
“A Working AI Firewall Framework”
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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